The drum major for the University of Michigan marching band rehearses as admiring children fall in line, 1950.

Take a fresh look at Alfred Eistenstaedt’s famous “Drum Major,” photographed in 1950. As the editor, writer, poet and one-time director of photography for LIFE, David Friend, once said, this picture is Eisenstaedt’s “ode to joy.”

“It was early in the morning,” Eisenstaedt said about the photograph taken on assignment for LIFE, covering the University of Michigan’s nationally famous marching band. He spotted the school’s drum major practicing. Then, Eisenstaedt said, “I saw a little boy running after him, and all the faculty children on the playing field ran after the boy. And I ran after them. This is a completely spontaneous, unstaged picture.”

I chanced to see my very poem on post here for a nationally acclaimed photo like this and really feel being honored this way. I am really thankful to Mr Gary Jurgens for his efforts. In fact I had seen this very photo sometime ago in some web page (perhaps here itself) and had really down-loaded it. This is simply a wonderful photo and one must remember that this was taken when no digital camera had arrived the market and the photographer had no idea about the out come of his endless clicks. The beauty of this photo is that it has a 3D effect. I like such oldies. I am also thankful to M/s TIME Newsfeed for showing kind gesture to incorporate my poem as one of the tags to one of the greatest photos all time.

to focus its gaze and find the proper angle for impact, clarity; to show from its own perspective the body of a child wrapped in a garment of pleated flesh, held gently in his mother’s arms as though she could lift him out of it and run from the scourge of that landscape, the lash of its tongue, its voice. To explain that image, a split-second paralysis that is forever fixed in the mind, forever mute, itself a bystander hovering over the children torn from the hand so tightly held, maimed and killed in the presence of their mothers.

There is the sense of one moment, immortal, held still in one shot, one frame; a strobe of light that is visible, and yet invisible: warlords, militant machinery, the blazing turrets of an uprising when well-fed armies tear into the city like hungry vagrants tearing the gutters for meat. There’s an old wagon, its wheels turned inward, rocking slowly at each stop to pile a sackcloth of children’s bones into a conveyance of silent darkness. And yet it’s always the negative we hold to the light for clarity, for meaning, as if we’ve missed some point of view, as if in that frame transposing light and dark, there’s an image we hope to see more clearly.

Happiness just like beauty mean different things to each of us, from the laughter of a baby to couples walking holding hands down the street. I hope "Drum Major" brought alot of happiness to this photographer